RINGSIDE ART

This is one of my favorite of all the Ringside posters.  I actually sold several copies of this.  I love Fascist art.  This composition of this imagery seemed to magically compliment my Ringside logo.

This one evolved over a long period of time.  It finally came together upon adding the disembodied head and thumb.  I would have loved to have done more disembodied heads.  They are astonishingly effective.  I had a number of black events and djs around this time and I was very interested as to what their response would be to this poster.  I think they gave me a pass on it.

This was a very large poster, 6’x4’.  I was somewhat afraid at the time of how blatantly queer it was, but I needn’t have worried.  It was very amusing and somewhat enlightening to notice how much my straight male customers were attracted to it, astonishingly unaware of how homoerotic it was and instead taking it at face value, approving and getting off on the tattoo imagery.

The imagery came from an old defunct magazine that featured Doris Day walking these garishly dyed poodles.  The black and white tile floor was reminiscent of Ringside’s dance floor.  This is an example of how the logo could make these sort of juxtapositions of images possible by providing the slight of hand when I chose this 50s leather boy to step in for Doris, just had to draw in the leashes.  The border was created by a tile pattern that I picked up at Home Depot. 

This imagery is part of what was a giant poster.  It had a sort of freak show circus theme.  I was so thrilled when I came up with this crazy juxtaposition, it seemed to say everything I wanted to say about what I wanted Ringside to be, sexually muddled.  It was great propaganda.  I learned that mixing straight porn with gay porn was very effective in getting these messages across.  It was trick I returned to over and over again.

Another example of gay and straight porn being combined to create something that was so very sly and challenging to my unsuspecting victims!  This was a cut and paste tour-de-force…the little slivers of paper that were these pointy stalletto heels.  The notion of a figure being surrounded by sexual footware was borrowed from Tom of Finland who did something very similar in a more straightforward homoerotic image.

This one was particularly loved by my heterosexual male customers.  Now and then I would make something like this to atone for my more queer images.  This image evolved over time as I attempted to find a fit for this circular Islamic pattern.  The old pornographic photograph, probably French, was a perfect fit.

This represented one of those “can I get away with this?” images.  I love lesbians, but they can sometimes be quite humorless with this sort of thing.  I think they reluctantly gave me a pass.  I was so proud of coming up with this and finally solving the problems in its composition.  I was in love with the central photo of the tassel twirler.  It was the lateral images on either side that begin to bring it all to life, reinforced by the lateral black band on the bottom and the goofy lettering at the top.  I had already worked on the version of the logo with the orgy of women, doubling of this brought the perspective to the central image of the tassel twirler.  Apparently I wasn’t the only one who liked the result: The original was stolen at some idiotic Duke frat party.  The Lesbian Cocktail hour was only mildly successful.

I always went full out for New Year’s Eve, it being one of the nights you could always count on to do some great business.  This was probably my last Ringside poster and one of the largest, 5’x7’.  I was really proud of it.  This one started to come together when I was able to lock the arms of the two body builders together.  It began to build from there.  My New Year’s posters generally always featured clocks or hourglasses.  This one is full of that sort of imagery.  Also, this represented what I had learned over time about the effectiveness of using a very limited color pallet.  It’s one of my favorite posters.  It seems to say so much…so much beyond its superficial message.

Now and then I would do a poster for what I thought might be a particularly interesting evening.  I put together this sort of edgy redneck music night.  I loved all of these acts.  This poster was an attempt to give my hipster customer base a way to approach this.  This poster came together by splitting the queer imagery on either side and also through the giant Old West font at the top.  The b & w picture of the nude cowgirl with the gun balanced out its homoeroticism.  The night was somewhat disappointing in terms of its turnout, but I was very proud of the poster.  Everyone signed it at the end of the evening.

Sometimes it’s all so simple.  I stumbled across this image of the two servicemen walking arm in arm…to victory I assume.  All I had to do was draw the cartoon dots between the two eyes to bring out its latent homoeroticism, then the “Let’s Go!” slogan and the border of stars and I had a very funny little poster.  People would laugh at this image.  That pleased me.

For Easter month one year I came up with this.  I had long had this paint by number last supper.  I thought it had some potential, but couldn’t make anything happen with it…until I came up with the idea of making the logo part of the template…the same color, the little numbers.  I thought the font I settled on had a rather Catholic feel.  Just the simple shadows on the one side popped it out and completed it.  I was very pleased with this one.

This was the second poster I did for Ringside.  It was a cold January night and they were filming Dawson’s Creek that night downstairs at Ringside.  This is an example of the discovery of using women in my images to neutralize the essential queerness of my art.  What made this poster work for me was the breaking out of the borders with the balls being tossed in the air.  I emphasized this by coloring the balls.